Sunday, January 9, 2011

A group of nursing students at Johnson County Community College were kicked out of school for posing with a human placenta and posting the photos on Facebook. (It seems the esteemed “in-mirror club shot” for Facebook has effectively been replaced.) According to court documents, the students were visiting a medical centre with their class in November when they asked their teacher if they could take photos with a placenta. The teacher “implied consent” and the girls snapped away, posting the pictures on a least one Facebook page. A few hours later, an instructor requested that the photos be taken down, and the students were informed that they were being “dismissed.” They responded by filing suit against the school.

This story has gone viral south of the border, inciting heated debate about the freedom to post the miscellaneous online and the appropriateness of school sanctions for non-academic conduct. The issue is not foreign to us here in Canada, as the University of Calgary is currently battling a case concerning its punishment of two students for content they posted on Facebook. The rhetoric is usually the same; either “give me freedom and stay off my page” or “privacy is dead, so act responsibly.”